Political Landscape: The Divided Republic

The Third Republic's political system, with its weak executive and powerful parliament, reflected and amplified France's divisions. The Dreyfus Affair, though officially resolved, had left lasting scars. The anticlerical Radical Party dominated governments, completing the separation of church and state in 1905, while Catholics, monarchists, and the nascent Action Française nursed grievances against the "godless Republic."

Socialist leader Jean Jaurès commanded a growing movement that rejected both capitalism and war. His newspaper, L'Humanité, reached hundreds of thousands with its message of international worker solidarity. "The proletarian has no country when that country belongs to the capitalists," he declared at a rally in 1913, earning both passionate applause and death threats.

On the right, figures like Maurice Barrès preached integral nationalism, viewing France as an organic whole threatened by Germans without and Jews, socialists, and internationalists within. The revival of interest in Joan of Arc—canonized in 1909—symbolized this nationalist awakening, her image claimed by both Republicans celebrating resistance to foreign invasion and Catholics mourning lost religious authority.